Bronisław Malinowski
Bronisław Kasper Malinowski was a Polish anthropologist and ethnologist whose writings on ethnography, social theory, and field research have exerted a lasting influence on the discipline of anthropology.
Malinowski was born and raised in what was part of the Austrian partition of Poland, Kraków. He graduated from King John III Sobieski 2nd High School. In the years 1902–1906 he studied at the philosophy department of the Jagiellonian University and received his doctorate there in 1908. In 1910, at the London School of Economics, he worked on exchange and economics, analysing Aboriginal Australia through ethnographic documents. In 1914, he travelled to Australia. He conducted research in the Trobriand Islands and other regions in New Guinea and Melanesia where he stayed for several years, studying indigenous cultures.
Returning to England after World War I, he published his principal work, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, which established him as one of Europe's most important anthropologists. He took posts as a lecturer and later as chair in anthropology at the LSE, attracting large numbers of students and exerting great influence on the development of British social anthropology. Over the years, he guest-lectured at several American universities; when World War II broke out, he remained in the United States, taking an appointment at Yale University. He died in 1942 while at Yale and was interred in a grave in New Haven, Connecticut. In 1967 his widow, Valetta Swann, published his personal diary kept during his fieldwork in Melanesia and New Guinea. It has since been a source of controversy, because of its ethnocentric and egocentric nature.
Malinowski's ethnography of the Trobriand Islands described the complex institution of the Kula ring and became foundational for subsequent theories of reciprocity and exchange. He was also widely regarded as an eminent fieldworker, and his texts regarding anthropological field methods were foundational to early anthropology, popularizing the concept of participatory observation. His approach to social theory was a form of psychological functionalism that emphasised how social and cultural institutions serve basic human needs—a perspective opposed to A. R. Radcliffe-Brown's structural functionalism, which emphasised ways in which social institutions function in relation to society as a whole.
Biography
Early life
Malinowski, a scion of the Polish szlachta, was born on 7 April 1884 in Kraków, in the Austrian Partition of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – then part of the Austro-Hungarian province known as the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. His father, Lucjan Malinowski, was a professor of Slavic philology at Jagiellonian University, and his mother was the daughter of a landowning family. As a child he was frail, often in ill health, but excelled academically. On 30 May 1902 he passed his matura examinations at the Jan III Sobieski Secondary School, and later that year began studying at the College of Philosophy of Kraków's Jagiellonian University, where he initially focused on mathematics and the physical sciences.While attending the university he became severely ill, and while he recuperated his interest turned more toward the social sciences as he took courses in philosophy and education. In 1908 he received a doctorate in philosophy from Jagiellonian University; his thesis was titled On the Principle of the Economy of Thought.
During his student years he became interested in travel abroad, and visited Finland, Italy, the Canary Islands, western Asia, and North Africa; some of those travels were at least partly motivated by health concerns. He also spent three semesters at the University of Leipzig, where he studied under economist Karl Bücher and psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, and examined the works of anthropologist Heinrich Schurtz. After reading James Frazer's The Golden Bough, he decided to become an anthropologist.
In 1910 he went to England, becoming a postgraduate student at the London School of Economics, where his mentors included C. G. Seligman and Edvard Westermarck.
Career
In 1911 Malinowski published, in Polish, his first academic paper, "Totemizm i egzogamia", in Lud. The following year he published his first English-language academic paper, and in 1913 his first book, The Family among the Australian Aborigines. In the same year he gave his first lectures at LSE, on topics related to psychology of religion and social psychology.In June 1914 he departed London, travelling to Australia, as the first step in his expedition to Papua. The expedition was organised under the aegis of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Initially Malinowski's journey to Australia was supposed to last only about half a year, as he was mainly planning on attending a conference there, and travelled there in the capacity of secretary to Robert Ranulph Marett. Shortly afterward, his situation became complicated due to the outbreak of World War I. Being a subject of Austria-Hungary, which was at war with the United Kingdom, Malinowski risked internment. He nonetheless decided not to return to Europe, and after intervention by a number of his colleagues, including Marett as well as Alfred Cort Haddon, the Australian authorities allowed him to stay in the region and even provided him with new funding.
His first field trip, lasting from August 1914 to March 1915, took him to the Toulon Island and the Woodlark Island. This field trip was described in his 1915 monograph The Natives of Mailu. Subsequently, he conducted research in the Trobriand Islands in the Melanesia region. He organized two larger expeditions during that time; from May 1915 to May 1916, and October 1917 to October 1918, in addition to several shorter excursions. It was during this period that he conducted his fieldwork on the Kula ring and advanced the practice of participant observation, which remains the hallmark of ethnographic research today. The ethnographic collection of artifacts from his expeditions is mostly held by the British Museum and the Melbourne Museum. During the breaks in between his expeditions he stayed in Melbourne, writing up his research, and publishing new articles, such as Baloma; the Spirits of the Dead in the Trobriand Islands. In 1916 he received the title of Doctor of Sciences.
In 1919, he returned to Europe, staying at Tenerife for over a year before coming back to England in 1920 and finally to London in 1921. He resumed teaching at the LSE, accepting a position as a lecturer, declining a job offer from the Polish Jagiellonian University. The following year, his book Argonauts of the Western Pacific, often described as his masterpiece, was published. For the next two decades, he would establish the LSE as Europe's main centre of anthropology. In 1924 he was promoted to a reader, and in 1927, a full professor. In 1930 he became a corresponding foreign member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1933, he became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1934 he travelled to British East Africa and Southern Africa, carrying out research among several tribes such as the Bemba, Kikuyu, Maragoli, Maasai and the Swazi people. The period 1926-1935 was the most productive time of his career, seeing the publications of many articles and several more books.
Malinowski taught intermittently in the United States, which he first visited in 1926 to study the Hopi. When World War II broke out during one of his American visits, he stayed there. He became an outspoken critic of Nazi Germany, arguing that it posed a threat to civilization, and he repeatedly urged US citizens to abandon their neutrality; his books duly became banned in Germany. In 1941 he carried out field research among the Mexican peasants in Oaxaca. He took up a position at Yale University as a visiting professor, where he remained until his death. In 1942 he co-founded the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America, of which he became its first president.
In addition to his work in academia, he has been described as a "wittily entertaining pundit" who wrote and spoke in media of the day on various issues, such as religion and race relations, nationalism, totalitarianism, and war, as well as birth control and sex education. He was a supporter of the British Social Hygiene Council, Mass-Observation, and the International African Institute.
Malinowski died in New Haven, Connecticut on 16 May 1942, aged 58, of a stroke while preparing to resume his fieldwork in Oaxaca. He was interred at Evergreen Cemetery in New Haven.
Works
Except for a few works from the early 1910s, all of Malinowski's research was published in English. His first book, The Family among the Australian Aborigines, published in 1913, was based on materials he collected and wrote in the years 1909–1911. It was well-received not only by contemporary reviewers but also by scholars generations later. In 1963, in his foreword to its new edition, John Arundel Barnes called it an epochal work, and noted how it discredited the previously held theory that Australian Aborigines had no institution of family.Published in 1922, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, about the society and economy of Trobriand people who live on the small Kiriwana island chain northeast of the island of New Guinea, was widely regarded as a masterpiece and significantly boosted Malinowski's reputation in the world of academia. His later books included Crime and Custom in Savage Society, Myth in Primitive Psychology, Sex and Repression in Savage Society, The Father in Primitive Psychology, The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia, and Coral Gardens and Their Magic. The works tackled issues such as reciprocity and quasi-legal sanctions, psychoanalysis of ethnographic findings courtship, sex, marriage, and the family, and perceived connections between agriculture and magic.
His paper "Psycho-Analysis and Anthropology" is believed to be the first use of the term "nuclear family". He incorporated the paper into his Sex and Repression in Savage Society.
A number of his works were published posthumously or collected in anthologies: A Scientific Theory of Culture and Others Essays, Freedom & Civilization, The Dynamics of Culture Change, Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays, Sex, Culture, and Myth, the controversial A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, and The Early Writings of Bronislaw Malinowski''.
Malinowski's personal diary, along with several others written in Polish, was discovered in his Yale University office after his death. First published in 1967, covering the period of his fieldwork in 1914–1915 and 1917–1918 in New Guinea and the Trobriand Islands, it set off a storm of controversy and what Michael W. Young called a "moral crisis of the discipline". Writing in 1987, James Clifford called it "a crucial document for the history of anthropology".
Many of Malinowski's works entered public domain in 2013.